GROWING Your Lawn Care Business (Questions and Answers)

What's up, everybody? Mike here I am live. Yes, I'm live on YouTube here. I'm currently in a hot tub. Yes, I'm in a hot tub. There's a pool down next to the water last night here at Palm Springs. So I want to hang out with you guys, spend some time. I'm going to close my email because I have bunch of emails coming in. Cool. So as you guys come in here, feel free to comment, add any Q and a. Q and A? Feel free to post those. Hopefully you're hearing me through my AirPods and not through my speakers of my laptop. So, East Tennessee Lawn Care, what's up? Thanks for joining.

This is my last night here at Palm Springs. I'm in the hot tub and wanted to. I got about 20, 30 minutes for my next call and wanted to connect. Watching from Australia. Merciful heaven. It's like one in the morning your time. Something like that. Integral on David Heath. What's up, Jubeckus? Lawn mowing and rubbish removal. What's up, cool.

New Jersey? Thanks guys for popping on here. I'm in the hot tub right now. Hopefully you can still see me. It's like super dark. So I actually have my phone set up for a light here and then my laptop here next to the hot tub. All right. 1:00pm oh, it's backwards. Sorry, my bad. Yeah, you're behind us in time. 35 yards going into the season. My goal is 70. Great job, East Tennessee Lawn Care. James, thank you for replying to my comment before. Cool, Junior. Hey, buddy. What's up? Mike watching from Sydney, Australia, man. We got a lot of Australians.

A couple on the. On the conference, too. Hello. From Seattle, Washington. Hey, Mike. From West Palm Beach, Florida. Quality one landscape, Alfonso Alexander. What's up, guys? So I'll hang out here for a little bit. If you guys have questions and things, I'm gonna try to keep it down because there is, like, people not far from me. And if anyone comes into this hot tub, I'm gonna leave too. So I might just all of a sudden end this the stream. But that's if someone shows up. It's gonna be really weird if I'm doing live Q and A on the hot tub. Like, I'm literally in the hot tub. So. All right, let's see what we can answer here. Junior, I enjoy your conference. Great Spring for Springfield. All the questions I have are answered at conference. Pretty much book recommendations. Currently I'm listening to. If you watch the vlog, you've probably seen it. I just finished today. Next Five moves. I really like that book. I think I don't. I rarely listen to books twice and I've listened to this one twice. I almost. I hate listening to books twice usually. So what's the most important questions personality wise to ask potentially employees? Honestly, their references is the biggest thing for me in terms of personality. I'm looking for someone who likes to self improve themselves if they're a manager. If they're a worker out in the field, I really like to hear what they say about their previous employer. If they're ragging on their previous employer, don't think you're gonna be any different. They're gonna find issues with you and chat about it too. Okay, let's see here. Fort Wayne, Indiana. What's up? What do you think of switch? And for landscaping. Not sure what you're saying there. Sorry. Hot tub rocks. Keep relaxed, brother. I've been in the business, this is my 16th year but I'm still learning every day. You were helping. You were still helping. Appreciate you. Dude, you are a joke. Everything is cheap. Oh, this is fun. Ricky Mendez dude, you are a joke. Everything is cheat where you live. Try running your business and ca you would be broke. Okay. So thanks. What made you tick? Dick Tills. Yeah. So basically if a franchise doesn't work out, we will send the general manager there. We don't have where the franchise. We will not hold someone to a contract so they can get out of the franchise if it doesn't work for him. So in that specific location there was a divorce involved and so the business had to shut down. So we sent. We're going to send a general manager in there and it'll do great. That location will be great. Felix is our general manager over there and he's gonna kill it.

Epic journey. Do you ever get in the meh mood in the winter? If so do you do. What did you get out of it? I make sure I exercise a lot. It helps me a lot with that. Honestly. In terms of winter, it doesn't really like seasonality doesn't affect me a whole lot. Weekends do though. Honestly, it's weird like Friday evenings for me. Sometimes it's like the hardest time. I gotta make sure I'm like active and doing stuff. I don't know why. Just trying to stay on top of things. Junior, where can I book a time with you in the YouTube comments is a thing if you want a coaching call. I don't know how much long I'm able to do that. Honestly, it's just not much time. David Swift and go truck dump setups. I have no idea what those are. Sorry. Like. Oh, like a roll off or hook lift truck. I've seen those. Those are really cool. I saw Alex Minshew, he did a video on that.

Oh no. We might have to close this stream down, folks. But I saw Alex mentioned. I've seen some people do it before. I think it's pretty legit, honestly, in terms of even for projects like mulch or debris and things like that.

But we have not used them before. One vital thing for third year operating honestly, I would say it's that's when you really need to start focusing on profitability. Usually year one and two, it's all about growth. After that though, you really gotta start focus on creating systems for profitability. So. All right, lawn care Juggernaut. Thanks for hopping on your brother. Okay, let's see here. One by. Thanks for all you do for a green industry. Hey, Mike. We talked briefly in a video chat when interviewing for the GM job. Coastal Oklahoma landscape here in Jacksonville, Florida. What's up, Tyler? Where can I book a time with you, Juggernaut? My words are cold. Worlds are colliding. So switching go, Mike. Is the guy listening? For sure, James. Okay. Any idea when the conference replay will be up? Would love to rewatch a few of the segments. Yeah. So it should be up, if not the end of this weekend, next week. Josh is just trying to put it all together and break it up into different segments and things like that. And it'll be available on teachable, which is like a really streamlined system. It won't be even like YouTube videos. It'll be like really nice. So we're just putting a little extra time into it. Make sure it looks it's more organized for you guys.

Tom Banks, when getting started, profit sharing, what percentage is appropriate when implementing it? Tom, we talked a lot about this at conference. We do 10% for our frontline employees. We do. And then for our management staff, it just depends on their role. And general manager, for example, it does everything and I'm not there. They're going to hit 25%. But we talked a lot about how we break that down and why. We do profit sharing a lot at conference. So we lucked out. All the people who came by, they saw we were streaming and they just kept walking by. So we'll keep going here.

Do you know Marty Grunder? I do not know him personally. I've heard good things about him actually. This past week I ordered a couple books from some of the old timers in this industry that don't do a lot of stuff on social media and things, but they have been around for a long time and I'm not opposed to learning from them and I want to learn more. So ordered some books and like CDs. Like I don't even know how I'm gonna listen to them honestly, but I'm gonna hopefully learn from them something, get one or two things out of them. He's awesome. I'm just trying to be a sponge, listening guys like you. Brian's lawn means always trying to learn. Integra, what do you prefer for growth? Putting a GM in place or a franchisee? Honestly, I don't, I'm not really, I don't really have a preference, honestly. The reason we're doing the GMs and the corporately owned stores is for us to constantly be able to test advertising. Like this winter for example, I actually paid personally for the ads at the front six or seven, like seven or eight actually locations of the franchises. And actually I paid their ads like I paid more in ad spend than they paid in monthly dues because I was testing so much stuff that I was trying to get data for across the country. And so I, you know, if we have our own locations, I can do that year round. I can change things around and just get better data. So honestly the GM thing for me it's more about that testing things out than it is which one's better for us. I just know that every year we need to be opening up one or two. At least this year happened to open three. But if we can constantly be opening them up, we'll stay on the cutting edge. Like we tried TikTok ads last year. We tried next door sponsorships, both of which did not work out good. So just. But constantly trying those things is important. My opinion, are you going to join any other industries in the future? Braulio Paramo not. I don't have any plans right now too. I'm pretty passionate about mental health and things. It's something that I'm going to be doing. It's kind of a passion project. So. Hey guys, keep the politics. Like this is, you know, I'm going to have to hide this comment. Sorry guys, I do not like censoring things but we're not going to get into politics on here. Okay.

Is your channel still for growth or bigger businesses? Because lately it seems like it's for newer businesses. Richard, great point. So the growth of the channel is something that I try to balance, right? Because I want to get as many people as possible to hear our message and kind of start listening to the videos and things. And that's going to be equipment videos and stuff for new lawn care landscapers. When it comes to culture team more really in depth systems and things like that, that does not bring new people to the channel and I'm more passionate about that stuff. That's what I care about. I know it matters the most for the business but we also are trying to impact the industry. So part of that is balancing now trying to get more new subscribers, new people, new business owners. I'd rather catch them when they're in their first year than in five years when they're falling apart. They have employees, they don't know how to manage them, they have massive overhead and they're in debt. So that's kind of what I'm trying to balance. And so I try to give some systems oriented stuff, deeper things but you're right, like I am trending more towards some of the newer stuff because I'd rather catch them now. That's kind of how I look at it. So Kevin. Hey Mike, what is ideal number of posts on social media for business? One a day or two a day or. Yeah, like honestly I like the volume game. I think one a day is obtainable for most of us to be able to just capture a good picture a day, put a good caption on there.

If you can do two great volume game in terms of it's mostly coming down to how can your time and can you actually get that much content out? That's the challenging part.

Chris Chana, who has been your biggest mentor, It'd be tough. I don't really have a mentor in person mentor that I meet with or anything like that. I just try to be a sponge in terms of online and learning from other people. Hello. Hello Mike. I have been watching your video since the first video you posted a few years ago. I learned so much. Thanks a million, Hercules. Gillian, how do you balance spiritual life and relational with trying to grow a business? I talk a little about balance at conference. I just try to go all in on whatever I'm doing at the moment. So I'm trying to get better at this. I'm not the best, by no means, but I feel like it's kind of like a top. Like as soon as a top stops movement, it stops motion is actually when it falls apart. And so I think for a lot of us that are kind of type A entrepreneurs go getters, we, we need to be moving, we need constantly going and for me to stop that would be detrimental to like my other relationships, my physical health, my personal life. And so when I'm in my opinion, it's like I go all in on whatever I'm doing in the moment. If I'm with my family, I gotta get better at this being like all in with the family. If I'm with business, like going all in on business, I need to relax for 20 minutes. Like going all in, relax. Like for example, like right now I got a bit of a gap and I was going to jump in and start making a bunch of marketing material for the franchisees. I'm like, you know what, gotta take a little bit of a break. So down in the hot tub, chilling out with you guys. So.

I just think honestly to answer that question, a little better being self aware. I don't think there's any standard and comparing yourself to other people is what gets people into trouble when it comes to work. Life balance and stuff, in my opinion. We've tried next door without much luck too. Yeah, like the sponsorship program that they have, the new ad product is trash so far I think they'll change that. Honestly, I think they'll get better at that. Their local deals has worked great comparatively.

Just tuned in longer. Mike, you are a true inspiration, brother. It is very cool to see you absolutely killing it. Thanks Long care juggernaut. Appreciate it, brother. Brent the Great. How important is painting and letting lettering up trucks? Should it be a priority for marketing dollars? I would not make it a priority for marketing dollars. I would say website, then I would say, then I would say painting your trucks and lettering it and then paid media, like paid ads and things. But even, even before you letter your truck, I think in terms of advertising, in terms of bang for your buck, it's going to be literally business cards and door hangers. Bang for your buck, right? Because like for a hundred dollars I can get thousands of door hangers and that's probably more business than painting my truck in the short term. But as your business grows and you get more money, I would, oh, trying to get my hands wet. As your business grows and things, you're probably going to put more and more towards paid media and less towards obviously your website and more assets, which is your trucks, your website, etc. But first thing would be your website, hands down. And it's not even close like with what's happened the past year. Everyone I talked to this conference, like the past year our target market has gone online for all the people who didn't have email, didn't use Amazon prime, all the rest of it that are our target market, the 50, 60, 70 year old, the pandemic has forced them online, forced them onto social media, forced them to, you know, use these different technologies. And so to be online right now is literally the most important thing you can be. If you aren't already, you're already behind. But you need to do something. I don't care if you long care designer. I don't care if you make it yourself. I don't care if you pay someone else. Just do it. It's so important. Okay.

See here. How big of a market do you think you will need to hit a million in revenue in three to four years in terms of population? I would say the smaller the better. Honestly, when people start getting too big of a market or too big of a radius, their territory, they're going after, they become a small fish in a very big pond. When we first started Augusta long here in Blaine, Washington, you can look it up. I think it's like 7,000 people live there, maybe a little bit more. But we grew it to 1.1 million in revenue before we moved from there. Because when we did a marketing piece, we could hit every single house in the entire city for like $1,000. We could, you know, if you do a facebook or ad or something like that, everyone would see it. So you get great brand penetration. The smaller territory, there's something with the franchisees I try to push very hard. Like look, we give you a 5 mile territory, 5 mile radius, which means you have 10 miles diameter. If I was you, I'd focus on like 1 mile radius at first. Get really, really good route density and then brand awareness and penetration in that market. So much easier. When you go into smaller demographic. I think people think that like, oh, if I have a million people, I can grow a bigger business. Has absolutely no correlation. I'd much rather be a big, big fish in a smaller pond. My brand dollars do much, much better. What has been the best one or two ways of marketing in terms of roi? In the past it was facebook ads. Now it's Google local services. Edward Perez. My father's landscaping focuses more on the hardscaping side of things. Any more advice? I heard you said we should raise prices and make a specialized type work. Focus on that niche. Right? Yeah. Edward. I would say, you know, I would always recommend trying to get recurring services even if it's not mowing. If you can do landscape maintenance, like once you install a project, you try to upsell someone on a package for maintenance. I think that's going to be much more long term sustainable and more dependable when it comes to projections versus trying to always depend on selling more projects.

Alex Christensen, Questions, Questions? Well, in my third year and my lawn maintenance route is filled up, when will be a good time to start my second crew? Usually when we're two to three weeks booked out is when we start hiring another crew. Kevin Fairburn, you guys even thought about pairing up or doing a mentor mentee program for yes, Kevin yes, we have similar kind of what we talked about at the end of the Thursday where we're going to pair up not only for the business side of things, but also for personal finances and things like that financial IT program. That's when we're going to start putting the franchisees together based upon where they're at in their business, where they're at in their personal finances and kind of do that mentor type of thing. Richard Fitzwell, how much capital would you recommend to have saved before you hire? Is it all about work? Yes, it is, Richard. Making sure that that work is profitable is important. And start asking yourself like from when? If you're out working by your okay, if I had to pay an employee X amount per hour, how much would I made after that? So many of us when we're solo, like, oh man, I made 300, I made 500. And you see those videos on YouTube. They do great on YouTube all the time. But after, okay, if I had made 500 in revenue, that's not 500 my pocket. Once I hire someone, that's now, okay, that's 250 in my pocket. And now I got a truck and I got equipment and I got a gasoline and I was overhead. Now it's my actual profit. So that's what you should be thinking about in terms of getting personal work for you. Okay. On running a landscape business, how high is bookkeeping? What should I do myself? How should I be making decisions? Really what I'm trying to ask is how to get better at bookkeeping. It's Chinese to me. So I would recommend getting a bookkeeper and asking them for their time, not their services. Say, hey, look, I'm willing to pay for two hours of time. I want you to help me set up my QuickBooks. I want you to set up my categories and show me how I can every week go in there and I can do my expense categorization and I want to come quarterly to you and you actually make sure I'm doing everything right. I think a lot of people who don't think it's Chinese to them. They simply delegate it to somebody. They don't delegate, they relegate it. They just give it to the bookkeeper and say, hey, take care of this stuff for me. I don't know what it's all about. Can you just do it for me? And they don't and ever. They lose track of their numbers, they lose track of their profitability, they lose track of everything. And so I would recommend an hour or two in front of. You're not an accountant. You don't need an accountant at this point. A bookkeeper Help. David, set up your chart of accounts and QuickBooks so you can do your expense categorization and just meet with them once a quarter is all you really need.

Let's see here. Question, Question. Good. All right. David Heath, what are some great examples of systems for a longer company? Integra, one of our target cities, banned all soliciting due. We got the cops called on my door hanging crew. We did too. We had door hand crews. The cops call on them. I got the phone call. Actually, I don't know how they had my phone number, but that was interesting. Does hiring an administrator to do bookkeeping, phone calls, etc makes sense? Yes, David does. Make sure you're charging estimate fee to cover that overhead. Chris chana, is Google AdWords your best online lead scores? How much do you spend on this or how much does each lead cost on Google AdWords? It's not our best, by no means. It's getting more expensive and Facebook will probably be doing the same thing. It already is getting more expensive as it becomes more popular. For us, anything over $10 a click is really bad. We shoot for between four and six. But again, every industry is gonna be different. Different. If you're doing, you know, project based work versus maintenance, et cetera, it's gonna be totally different. People are getting very upset about door hangers. This year. I shut them down and went online this year. I agree. I started out with a huge service area. I've slowly been bringing it back in. Jack. Hey, Mike, I'm a 14 year old and I'm trying to get more clients to my landscaping company. What is the best way to get small landscape jobs that are like 1 to 5,000 without getting a website? Jack, I would take your existing mowing customers and literally try to sell them property cleanups and mulch installations. That would be the first place I would start. I would give them a proposal. Even if maybe you have 10 customers, I would give them a proposal without even asking if they want an estimate. I just Give them. We call them blind estimates. We just give them or complementary estimates too. Blind or complementary estimates. And we just give them an estimate even if they didn't ask for it. That'd be the number one way to get started with those small projects. And then as soon as you install mulch, it looks really, really nice. Go then all three, four neighbors around them and ask them if they'd want an estimate for the mulch as well. Because everyone wants to stay up with the Joneses. James, this is crazy stuff to hear about door hangers from Integra and Juggernaut. I feel like those would be optimal since there's no face to face contact. Yeah. James is a little bit strange. Every territory is a little bit different for us. We did some. Some door hangers we got. The cops called on us one time. But for a lot of our locations that were just starting out last spring is brutal because they were depending a lot on that low cost form of marketing, which is door hangers and spending more of their time like delivering them. And then that was shut down. It was brutal.

I have 50 accounts. It's going to be my second season. What should I do to increase revenue so I can hire a helper and focus on growing the business? I would definitely double down on route density if you have 50 customers. I'd be trying to do door hangers around the five to nine houses around each year current properties. And.

I would hire a helper in your truck. Don't go buy another truck. Just get a helper. I can maybe work with you two or three days a week. You can do the estimates outside of the time that they're working with you. So you can still run P4P and that's what I would do. That first employee. Are you keeping an eye on the autonomous mower companies? Integra Lawns? Yes. We talked about this at conference in the Q and A section. I am very, very.

Much in tune with it and excited. I do not look as a threat. This is something we talked about, the SWOT analysis at conference. I don't look as a threat. I think it's a huge opportunity because when you look at mowing service and when I say mowing service, I mean like edging, blowing, you know, mowing kind of that whole game. When you look at that whole thing, the most. The most expensive thing for us to do is mow someone's lawn. We have the biggest piece of equipment. Whereas the edging is cheap. You know, pulling the weeds are cheap. The blowing off is relatively cheap compared to the big zero turn or even a mower, push mower or 30x mower. Still comparatively most expensive piece of equipment doing the most repetitive task. So in my opinion, a robotic mower would be fantastic if they could get the technology and the cost down. If they can figure that stuff out, it would basically solve our problem, which right now is finding laborers. Right? So think about if you could have it where you pull up to a property. You already have an autonomous mower there that does the mowing. You pay them a certain fee, you get charged a fee per week. And you'd come and edge, blow, pull the weeds, trim the bushes, all the stuff that a robot can't do. And you don't need a big truck, you don't need a big trailer, you don't need a big mower. Like you could literally run around in like a transit van. A small, very fuel efficient, you don't need a bunch of trailers and big truck. So like I'm very excited about autonomous mowers right now. The cost is too high, way too high. And there's a few other things obviously, but technology will catch up. What would be the best way to track cost per lead on radio ads? I would have a landing page. Seth. Or a separate phone number that could track those. And I have not seen radio work very well in this industry, but that's how I would track it. Juggernaut. What indicators do you like to track on a daily financial dashboard? Really the main metric is labor compared to revenue. I'm always interested in that percentage. It's the main thing.

Juan. Hey Mike, do you what do you think about automated email marketing? I really like it, I really do. I think it's especially important to keep your leads warm and send out monthly one click estimate emails or asking for the sale every month based upon the different services that you can offer throughout the year. You're awesome. You're helping a lot of people and you're grateful and we're all grateful. You're welcome. Thanks Caesar. Chuck fought. Aren't you on vacation, my friend? I am on vacation. I'm taking a break. I'm in the hot tub, Chuck. See, look at, look at that. Chuck gave me a great referral to where I can do hike here in Palm Springs. And I talked to you the other day, Chuck. So like I'm basically on vacation. As long as I'm talking to you, Eric Magin. Mike, I just want to say I'm proud of you, man. Keep it up. Thank you, Jack. Hey, I know you answered my question, but my Goal is to make 50k next year. Do you think that's an achievable goal? What is the best way to meet that goal or near the goal? Jack. It's put your selling shoes on.

I'm seeing this more and more for our new franchisees. Some of them who don't have the money get out there and just grind. They're great salespeople. They are not afraid to go from door to door. They're not afraid when they put mulch in to talk to all the neighbors, to, you know, put door hangers out and go talk to people. Just go talk to people. People need our services, people in general, or they're lazy or they physically should not be doing the work themselves. They're older. And this is a great opportunity. 2021's gonna be massive, guys, for this industry. I know I talked about conference, but like, with the amount of money that's in the system right now, the real estate market being as hot as it is, and people looking at their house as a, an asset right now, 2021 for this industry is gonna be huge. This is why you gotta get online. You gotta take advantage of this stuff. I think 2021 is gonna be one of the biggest years for this industry ever. For the people who can keep their team and figure out the. The labor market, they're going to kill it.

Jack. So, Jack, to answer your question more, I would get outside of your box, I would get outside of your comfort zone and I'd go talk to people. I'd ask customers if they know of anyone down the street that could use your services. I just get really scrappy, you know? Yeah, I've seen that undercover billionaire show and I think one day I would love to do that where I get dropped in for like three months and I have to build a lawn care business, like from scratch. Was like a hundred bucks. I would love to do that. Love, love, love, love to do that.

David Heath, what are your thoughts on the today's president for the next four years? Growth economy, stock market, clients spending money. Yeah, so I kind of talked about a little bit in terms of the economy, the stock market. The amount of money that's gonna be pumped in is gonna be pretty incredible. We're gonna see a shift towards clean energy. There's a really good chance corporate tax rates are going up. So again, I talked about this in December. Like, you might have wanted to take, you know, pay some taxes last year and take some gains, because this year the taxes are going to go up. So sure enough, it's almost guaranteed they'll go up some. We'll see how fast they do that. But I think from the stock market perspective, with all the money being pumped in.

I think there's going to be. It's going to be a pretty good year. It's going to be choppy though. I do believe there's going to be some things, I think like a lot of this has already been priced in the stock market in my opinion, in terms of stimulus and another stimulus probably. I think a lot of it's been priced in the market. But there's definitely opportunities and some industries, in my opinion that have been stalled out for the past five to six months that are going to take off here pretty soon. And we saw that today. Like, my goodness, the stock market went crazy today. I actually sold out 10% because it's just, it's just very frothy on some regard. So that 10% is what? Yeah, I took out 10% today. I don't usually sell, I never sell, but I took a little bit off 10 table today.

Okay, I would like to do a collaboration. That's one second, I gotta go up. When you do a cleanup, how do you go about upselling them so you can turn them into a recurring client? Do you give them a quote to maintain it monthly after the initial visit? So Brent, I would recommend when you go for a cleanup or you go for a project at that time, try to sell them on a recurring basis. So if you do a project and instead of just selling them the project, sell them. Hey, this is the initial price, the cleanup and here's the recurring service. So if I'm going to do trim all your bushes. If I am going to, you know, get everything cleaned up, here's the initial price and then the recurring price based on a monthly or a bi weekly visit. For example, always, always, always. Same thing with mowing. You know, when you get to a property, it's very rare that we're not going to charge us somewhat extra on the first visit. So it's initial price and then recurring price. And usually people are, they'd rather you're going to have a higher close ratio on the recurring work. If you sell it with the initial.

That'd be my recommendation. It's like when you buy a car, like when you buy the cars, when they try to sell you the service package, it's because you're more inclined to get the service package at the point of sale. So long, care juggernaut. Mike, I would like to do a collaboration video with you Sometime if you have any interest, let me know and I will get a hold of you and let me know what I have in my lawn care juggernaut. I'm all game. Send me an email. John Del Sortie Yard space is very limited in my area. How far out would you go for yard space? Continue to grow very quickly but challenges we finding more space. I would try to stay within 10 to 15 minutes of most of your market if at all possible in terms of finding space to park your trucks and things. I know it's challenging though, especially right now with the economy and the real estate market the way it is. JR Landscaping Just wanted to say thank you for the awesome content information. Your big inspiration. Code three fire. I have a landscaping company. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Too many questions. One second. Sorry guys. It keeps jumping around on me. Oh, here we go. Code three fire. I had a landscaping have a landscaping company in California. What exactly was that franchise video? What exactly is that? Just check out Augusta longer services.com franchise. That'll answer your questions. Let's see Mike Flex. I don't think so, Freddie. We'll try to get some workout videos one of these days. Cleanups were crazy this year with all the house selling. Exactly. Selling houses, buying houses. Both great times where people are less price sensitive and need stuff about. It's all about speed. What's your thoughts on hdb? I would be very cautious on hdb. You've seen what happened with COVID and I don't think it's going to be reversed anytime soon. Even with the new administration because of COVID We've got to get more anti fragile and we got to start thinking about things that could wipe us out. And for the companies that had massive HDB programs this past spring, they were the ones calling me in absolute desperation because 80% of their workflow source wasn't going to show up. That's killer. So just thinking about like hdb, whatever, whatever, you know, different services, employees, trucks, whatever it is. Just trying to think about where are the parts of your business that could fall apart and really hurt you. It's very, very important to think about that stuff. Why are you scaling back on the real estate, Richard? Honestly, it's not a huge, huge passion of mine. I'd rather spend the money on growing the franchise at new locations as well as this a reset project I'm working on with mental health stuff. I got 10 units and if there was a good deal that was really, really good, I would buy it. But I'm not like out looking for deals right now, like, I was past last spring when there was, like, great deals on the market after Covid. So I'm not like, I'm not like the stock market, real estate business, whatever. It's like, I'm not trying to, like, just do one thing. It's like, what's the best deal at the moment? And then I try to go in on that, Right? So, like, stocks and real estate last spring at. Right after Covid were an absolute bargain. And when I saw the. The rates that the Fed was doing, cutting rates with the Fed and the amount of money being pumped in, they were just. No, there was just no way, unless you literally believe America was gonna get wiped out, that it wasn't going to bounce back very hard. And so that's why I jumped in. Now everything's kind of equilibrated, whether it be a stock market, real estate. So I'm focusing on the businesses because I feel like that's the best ROI and I'm more passionate about it. Okay, you're answering a lot of questions. You're answering a lot of questions. I have. Awesome. I know what you mean about having something that's sustainable. Edward Perez. My father went down to two employees in 2008, but if it wasn't for the accounts monthly check coming in, he saved the company. Hi, Mike. What drone would you recommend? The Mavic Mini is great. That was the one I used the other day. It's a new one. It's a lot better in my opinion, because it's just better than the. We used to have the spark, but like four or five years old. I crashed it a couple times. Josh crashed a couple times. And now it's probably going to the graveyard. The drone graveyard. Oh, Copper Creek. What's up, brother? Congrats on, like 20. No, 50 million views or something crazy today. I saw that. Great, Great job, brother. Good evening, sir. Hotel management has received several complaints about crazy.

Oh, man, your. Your humor is on point, man. I love it. The stuff you post is great. You have a great sense of humor. Landscapes of America. Hey, Mike. We sold our landscaping division last month, but held on to our street sweeping division. I don't always agree with you. Our business model is different, though. Still got love for you. Thanks, brother. See, that's what we gotta do. You know, just gonna disagree with someone doesn't mean you gotta, like, hate on them. Like, I don't agree with some of the stuff that, like, some of these, you know, older guys have been around for, like 40 years in the industry, teach about marketing and things but like, I literally ordered 780 worth of material from a few of them this past week because I know there's something I can learn in there. So, like, it's not like if you disagree with someone, doesn't mean you can't learn from them. Okay. Ariel, are you. Do you recommend using Yarnbook for beginners and shout out from Phoenix, Arizona, Yardbook Lawn Pro. Great for beginners. You're going to try to scale? I would eat the cost and get something bigger if you're. If you know down the road you're going to scale in the next few years, eat the cost earlier if you know you're going to get to that point. If you want to stay smaller. Under 15, $20,000 a month yard book. Vaughn Pro would be great place.

Pretty sure. You okay? 100%. Looking forward to brother. Mike, what drone you use? Collab would be awesome. Not sure what you have in mind, Kev, but can't wait. Do you think a physics degree is worth it? Depends what you're going for. You know, for business. Probably not.

Making someone unhappy.

No, we're good. Okay. That someone was talking to us. All right, let's see here. Do you think a phys. No. How have you been handling Internet at a portable office? Shipping container on a vacant lot. Oh, my word. Internet is brutal. We pay an arm and a leg to bring in fiber optic.500 plus a month just to bring in fiber optic to that container. Before that we were doing Hughes Net and before that we were doing literally hot spots. Horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. So. But now we pay an arm and a leg for Internet. But it's really good Internet. Really good Internet. Just very expensive. Clean energy will bring a big hurt on everyone. Goods and services are going to go up way high. Extraordinary money. What Augusta. Are you from Augusta, Georgia? I'm not from Augusta, but we do have a franchise in Augusta, Georgia as well. Hey, Mike, do you build in profit in your hourly rate or do you tack it onto the job quote? Xavier, look at some of my other videos about that. I talk about hourly. How to calculate that. The biggest thing though is especially when you're using P4P check what is a conference. It's all about your labor rate to the customer versus your labor cost. Like that percentage is the biggest variable in our industry. Obviously overhead is the next thing. So if someone has that nailed labor in the field, waiver versus the revenue being generated, the next thing I'm looking at, they're having financial issues. Is. Are they. Do they have overhead issues? Do they have like an s. You know, one office person for every person out in the field. They have like a general manager, an estimator, a project manager, all with their own truck driving around all day. And they have like five people in the field working. That's a problem. So that's kind of the thing that I look at. Michael Endicott. Hey, I'm turning 18. Do you have any opinions on credit cards, perks for business? I like cash back. Honestly, if you're just getting started building their credit. Top peak. Hey Mike, I'm starting my lawn care landscape business this spring. Do you believe a three or four truck operation can be profitable for a nice lifestyle? Absolutely. Top peak. If you look at the. Look back at the profit and loss statements every month, the Mount Vernon location, one to two people, two trucks, very healthy profit margins, good lifestyle. It's all about the systems that you implement and having the right pricing from day one. Like from day one, that Mount Vernon location was charging a premium price. But they had the systems to back it up. They had the branding, the website. Everything was high value. And so you can absolutely do that. That's why there's no reason to think you need to build a 15 person, 20 crew person, whatever, a business to be happy, content and make a good profitable business. It's what's right for you. Way too much politics involved with the HDV program. They should go back to the way it was and let them work. Integra. I have Jim Huston coming next month. He's been around forever. We used him two years ago and turned my business around. Hey Mike, how are you guys liking the commercial 30? We like the commercial 30. There's definitely a little. Few kinks and things we had to work out. We made a few modifications. But the nice thing is it's cheap to fix and the parts are simple. So we keep. We can train all of our crew, even if they're entry level, on how to fix them out in the field so we don't have to like if a zero turn breaks down, good luck them trying to figure out how to fix it. Even if the belts come off on a zero turn or like a spindle or a motor like my goodness, it can be expensive and very hard to fix versus X mark. It might break down bit more often. But it's like a cable, it's like a spring. It's like simple stuff. And we can train the guys in the most common things and they can fix out in the field so that they have no downtime.

Richard Enclosed trailer or storage Unit. What would you pick to work out of? We do this, we. We don't use a storage unit. We use a container, like a shipping container on land. That's what our. The ideal location would be. If not, we would be at storage and then the trailers. I would tend not to go trailer route trailers unless I was only staying at one or two crews. If you're gonna scale really big, finding labor again is gonna be the end all be all in this in this industry, in my opinion. And simpler you can make your setup this, the easier you're gonna be able to find good labor consistently. And a lot of people don't know how to drive trailers, so we try to limit that using the trailerless setup and then parking the equipment inside of like a shipping container or storage facility. Okay, I got a few more minutes here before I gotta bounce. I'm starting this year. I have an estimated $20,000 in jobs already for spring. I have a website and social media. I have about $10,000 left over with my budget. Where should I put this in marketing, landscape. Plus I talked about this conference. The top four, like number one, Google local services and then work my way down, like all the way to like number 15 would be probably like radio and TV ads. Etc. So again, test your market though. Test what works, see what's working. Don't get a bazillion door hangers. Get a thousand, distribute them and see how it works. Don't go all in on Facebook and spend 5,000 in a week. Like figure out test and then, then go all in once you figure that out. Mike. Our lot size in our market is 10,000 square feet. About 7,000 subtracting the house, do you recommend 30x mower still for this lot size, I like the hitch mount mower setup. So anything over about 5,6000 square feet of turf starts becoming a little bit laborious for a push mower. If you have a 36, 30x mower, not bad. Your size of lot, the average is right around where our Bellingham location is. As long as your budget hours on the job are correct and your guys are getting paid based upon budget hours, they shouldn't complain. It's if they're number one. If your market is much bigger, like you got 15 20,000 square foot lots consistently, it's gonna be brutal on their bodies. And if you don't adjust budget hours for that, they're going to be mad. Especially if you're on P for P. But that's kind of your market that you talk about. There's similar to the one in Bellingham that we have. Hey, Mike, would you recommend credit cards or loans if I can run liquid? I don't know if I can run liquid. I would. I don't like running anything on credit cards. That's long term. If I can't pay it off every month. Thank you, Mike. I just hope I can get enough customers. Those blind estimates work. Hey, Mike, hope all's well. Finding labor is a huge issue here in Georgia. What is your best marketing advice with $5,000 budget for starting? We kind of talked about that already. Do you think it ever makes sense to build a large heated shop or keep scaling with multiple shipping containers? Seth? I think it either way works to come down to what you want out of the business. Obviously, we are building a very nice shop here in the next couple years. That's mostly due to the fact that we're trying to bring the franchise and the command center and the local shop all together. If we weren't doing that, we would probably keep scaling out a much more lean model. If we're just doing out in the field, I would just be as lean as possible. Like shipping containers. You can move anytime. You can be on cheap land. You don't need any commercial land. You don't need permits to build them. So shipping containers or sheds that are under certain amount of square feet, etc. Do you think college helps before I start a landscaping business? Depending on your specific situation in terms of actual running a business, I don't believe so. I think you can learn a lot from books and online, you know, YouTube and, you know, reading books about marketing and business and all that good stuff. I don't think you need college to run a landscape business. Is there certain elements of college that are helpful for some people? Yes. I did it for six or seven years. Wait, more than that? No. Yeah, six or seven years. All right, cool. I'm gonna head out, guys. I appreciate you all hopping on here. Thanks so much for the love and we will see you next week. No, I'll see you tomorrow probably with something. But I appreciate you all hopping on here. I am going to head back to work and this is my last evening here out in Palm Springs. Tomorrow I'll be back home. Got some cool projects coming up and I appreciate all support. Everyone came to conference. Landscape business course, lawn careweb design.com. i just really appreciate it. So really, really thankful this time of year when I come out and kind of look back at the past year and look forward to what we're going to do all the franchisees at Augusta Nation just very, very appreciative. So we'll see you guys. Have a great evening, and thanks so much.